across the breadth of their back.
Perceval could feel their attention on herself and Tristen. His white armor and height were unmistakable, and she imagined she was unmistakable, too. Her armor was also white, stark and plain, but that was not because she had chosen the presence of all colors as a personal badge. She had never customized this suit, but rather wore it as it had walked to her out of the storage module.
She wondered if the crew members saw that as humility or hubris. Most probably, some of each.
However they interpreted her presence, though, it did not hurt the Captain’s popularity or authority to be seen doing the work of walking the hull. Perceval hoped it showed she did not set herself above the common folk, which was doubtless a part of Tristen’s intent in bringing her out here.
He was by far the better politician.
Side by side in their armor, a few meters apart, they quartered the skin of the world. Most of Perceval’s conscious attention remained on the hull, but between her own senses and those of the armor, she could hardly have pretended to be unaware of the vast sweep of the Enemy around her. Chilly stars lay scattered like dust across its velvet, all surpassed by the brighter pinpoint of the destination star.
It glowed an intense white-gold, brilliant enough to cast shadows that lay black against the gray-white, radiation-marked skin of the world. The contrast was sharp enough that when Perceval and Tristen turned away from the destination sun and their shadows stretched before them, Perceval had to shade even her Exalt eyes with her visor to see clearly into the blackness.
All around, the great scaffolded architecture of the world turned, rotating lazily before its center of thrust. To Perceval it did not seem as if the world wheeled around its axis. She knew how it worked, but when she looked up, Perceval’s imagination told her the stars wheeled around the world. Her armor and her Exalt senses would quickly put the illusion to rest if she checked their inputs, but she found she rather enjoyed it.
When it had been stationary—or only falling in orbit around the shipwreck stars—the world had rotated around itself with a grandeur Perceval well remembered. The world was so vast that even when it whipped about its center of gravity with great speed, the view across the gulf suggested a stately pace—an impression only made more inescapable by its space-stained, dust-scoured, radiation-pitted surface.
In pattern—and a bit in color—the surface under Perceval’s feet reminded her of the fur of a tortoiseshell cat. There had been time and materials since Acceleration for the crew to effect some repairs in the world, but cosmetic damage had been a low priority. While shipshape and spaceworthy, the Jacob’s Ladder still bore the wounds of her age—another factor that made the walking inspections so essential. These young Engineers were getting to know the face of the world—every wrinkle and every blemish. And new injuries would show up either as structural weaknesses or metal fatigue—visible to toolkits, armor, or Exalt senses—or as bright scars in the burned and mottled hulk they walked upon.
Logically, Perceval knew it would have taken thirty-nine minutes for their transmission to reach Grail, as they were not approaching its orbit from the near side of the sun. They planned to use the gravity well of one of the system’s gas giants—a violet monster of a planet, decked in rings and moons and captured asteroids like so much glistening gaudery—as a slingshot to curve their trajectory and boost them toward Grail.
So that was approximately thirty-nine minutes one way, and then whatever time it took for the people of Grail to realize they had received a message, decode it, translate it, hold whatever conferences needed holding, argue, politick, and fire it back. They would not, she thought, be sending their message of permission or denial tonight. At best she could hope for a preliminary contact—a feeler.
She still wanted to sit in her Captain’s chair—more like a throne than a chair, no matter what she told Nova to do with it aesthetically—and chew on her thumbnails until they called.
Instead, she looked up, startled from her reverie by the staccato vibration of Tristen patting a long, curved cable as thick around as four men holding hands.
“Sit here,” he said. “We’ll have lunch now.”
“Outside?” she said, startled, imagining unsealing her helmet and crunching ice-hard, space-frozen vegetables. It didn’t present a lot of appealing aspects, even without considering the effect